That slight lift of one naked shoulder, Crawford’s shrug of disdain, here is another signature gesture stolen from me.
Above the mantel hangs a portrait of Miss Katherine painted by Salvador Dalí; it rises from a thicket of engraved invitations and the silver-framed photographs of men whom Walter Winchell would call “was-bands.” Former husbands. The painting of my Miss Kathie, her eyebrows arch in surprise, but her heavy eyelashes droop, the eyelids almost closed with boredom. Her hands spread on either side of her face, her fingers fanning from her famous cheekbones to disappear into her movie star updo of auburn hair. Her mouth something between a laugh and a yawn. Valium and Dexedrine. Between Lillian Gish and Tallulah Bankhead. The portrait rises from the invitations and photographs, future parties and past marriages, the flickering candles and half-dead cigarettes stubbed out in crystal ashtrays threading white smoke upward in looping incense trails. This altar to my Katherine Kenton.
Me, forever guarding this shrine. Not so much a servant as a high priestess.
In what Winchell would call a “New York minute” I carry the place card to the fireplace. Dangle it within a candle flame until it catches fire. With one hand, I reach into the fireplace, deep into the open cavity of carved pink onyx and rose quartz, grasping in the dark until my fingers find the damper and wrench it open. Holding the white card, Webster Carlton Westward III, twisting him in the chimney draft, I watch a flame eat the name and telephone number. The scent of vanilla. The ash falls to the cold hearth.
On the television, Preston Sturges and Harpo Marx enter as Tycho Brahe and Copernicus. The first arguing that the earth goes around the sun, the latter insisting the world actually orbits Rita Hayworth. The picture is called Armada of Love, and David O. Selznick shot it on the Universal back lot the year when every other song on the radio was Helen O’Connell singing “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” backed by the Jimmy Dorsey band.
The bathroom door swings open, Miss Kathie’s voice saying: bark, yip, cluck-cluck … Maxwell Anderson. Her Katherine Kenton hair turbaned in a white bath towel. Her face layered with a mask of pulped avocado and royal jelly. Pulling the belt of her robe tight around her waist, my Miss Kathie looks at the lipstick dumped on her bed. The scattered cigarette lighter and keys and charge cards. The empty evening bag. Her gaze wafts to me standing before the fireplace, the tongues of candle flame licking below her portrait, her lineup of “was-bands,” the invitations, all those future obligations to enjoy herself, and—of course—the flowers.
Perched on the mantel, that altar, always enough flowers for a honeymoon suite or a funeral. Tonight features a tall arrangement of white spider chrysanthemums, white lilies and sprays of yellow orchids, bright and frilly as a cloud of butterflies.
With one hand, Miss Kathie sweeps aside the lipstick and keys, the cigarette pack, and she settles herself on the satin bed, amid the candy wrappers, saying, “Did you burn something just now?”
Katherine Kenton remains among the generation of women who feel that the most sincere form of flattery is the male erection. Nowadays, I tell her that erections are less likely a compliment than they are the result of some medical breakthrough. Transplanted monkey glands, or one of those new miracle pills.
As if human beings—men in particular—need yet another way to lie.
I ask, Did she misplace something?
Her violet eyes waft to my hands. Petting her Pekingese, Loverboy, dragging one hand through the dog’s long fur, Miss Kathie says, “I do get so tired of buying my own flowers.…”
My hands, smeared black and filthy from the handle of the fireplace damper. Smudged with soot from the burned place card. I wipe them in the folds of my tweed skirt. I tell her I was merely disposing of some trash. Only incinerating a random piece of worthless trash.
On television, Leo G. Carroll kneels while Betty Grable crowns him Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Pope Paul IV is Robert Young. Barbara Stanwyck plays a gum-chewing Joan of Arc.
My Miss Kathie watches herself, seven divorces ago—what Winchell would call “Reno-vations”—and three face-lifts ago, as she grinds her lips against Novarro’s lips. A specimen Winchell would call a “Wildeman.” Like Dorothy Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell, a man Lillian Hellman would call a “fairy shit.” Petting her Pekingese with long licks of her hand, Miss Kathie says, “His saliva tasted like the wet dicks of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.”
Next to her bed, the night table built from a thousand hopeful dreams, those balanced screenplays, it supports two barbiturates and a double whiskey. Miss Kathie’s hand stops petting and scratching the dog’s muzzle; there the fur looks dark and matted. She pulls back her arm, and the towel slips from her head, her hair tumbling out, limp and gray, pink scalp showing between the roots. The green mask of her avocado face cracking with her surprise.
Miss Kathie looks at her hand, and the fingers and palm are smeared and dripping with dark red.
ACT I, SCENE THREE
Katherine Kenton lived as a Houdini. An escape artist. It didn’t matter … marriages, funny farms, airtight Pandro Berman studio contracts … My Miss Kathie trapped herself because it felt such a triumph to slip the noose at the eleventh hour. To foil the legal boilerplate binding her to bad touring projects with Red Skelton. The approach of Hurricane Hazel. Or the third trimester of a pregnancy by Huey Long. Always one clock tick before it was too late, my Miss Kathie would take flight.
Here, let’s make a slow dissolve to flashback. To the year when every other song on the radio was Patti Page singing “(How Much Is) That Doggy in the Window?” The mise-en-scène shows the daytime interior of a basement kitchen in the elegant town house of Katherine Kenton; arranged along the upstage wall: an electric stove, an icebox, a door to the alleyway, a dusty window in said door.
In the foreground, I sit on a white-painted kitchen chair with my feet propped on a similar table, my legs crossed at the ankle, my hands holding a ream of paper. A note flutters, held by paper clip to the title page. In slanted handwriting the note reads: I demand you savor this while it still reeks of my sweat and loins. Signed, Lillian Hellman.
Nothing is ever so much signed by Lilly as it is autographed.
On page one of the screenplay, Robert Oppenheimer puzzles over the best method for accelerating particle diffusion until Lillian stubs out a Lucky Strike cigarette, tosses back a shot of Dewar’s whiskey, and elbows Oppenheimer away from the rambling equation chalked the length of a vast blackboard. Using spit and her Max Factor eyebrow pencil, Lilly alters the speed of enriched uranium fission while Albert Einstein looks on. Slapping himself on the forehead with the palm of one hand, Einstein says, “Lilly, meine liebchen, du bist eine genious!”
At the window of the kitchen door, something outside taps. A bird in the alley, pecking. The sharp point of something tap, tap, taps at the glass. In the dawn sunlight, the shadow of something hovers just outside the dusty window, the shining point pecking, knocking tiny divots in the exterior surface of the glass. Some lost bird, starving in the cold. Digging, chipping tiny pits.
On the page, Lillian twists a copy of the New Masses, rolling it to fashion a tight baton which she swats across the face of Christian Dior. Harry Truman has herded together the world’s top fashion mavens to brand the signature look of his ultimate weapon. Coco Chanel demands sequins. Sister Parish sketches the bomb screaming down from the Japanese sky trailing long bugle beads. Elsa Schiaparelli holds out for a quilted sateen slipcover. Cristobal Balenciaga, shoulder pads. Mainbocher, tweed. Dior scatters the conference room with swatches of plaid.
Brandishing her rolled billy club, Lilly says, “What happens if the zipper gets stuck?”
“Lilly, darling,” says Dior, “it’s a fucking atom bomb!”
At the kitchen window, the sharp beak drags itself against the outside of the glass, tracing a long curve, scratching the glass with an impossible, high-pitched shriek. An instant migraine headache, the point traces a second curve. The two curves combine to fo
rm a heart, etched into the window, and the dragging point plows an arrow through the heart.
On paper, Adrian sees the entirety of the atom bomb encrusted with a thick layer of rhinestones, flashing a dazzling Allied victory. Edith Head pounds her small fist on the conference table at the Waldorf=Astoria and proclaims that something hand-crocheted must rain fiery death on Hirohito, or she’ll pull out of the Manhattan Project. Hubert de Givenchy pounds on Pierre Balmain.
I stand and cross to the alley door. There we discover my Miss Kathie standing in the alley, bundled in a fur coat, both arms folded across her chest, hugging herself in the cold dawn.
I ask, Isn’t she home a few months early?
And Miss Kathie says, “I found something so much better than sobriety.…” She waves the back of her left hand, the ring finger flashing with a Harry Winston diamond solitaire, and she says, “I found Paco Esposito!”
The diamond, the tool she used to cut her heart so deep into the glass. The heart and Cupid’s arrow etched in the alley window. Yet another engagement ring she’s bought herself.
Behind her stands a young man hung like a Christmas tree with various pieces of luggage: purses, garment bags, suitcases and satchels. All of it Louis Vuitton. He wears blue denim trousers, the knees stained black with motor oil. The sleeves of his blue chambray shirt rolled high to reveal tattooed arms. His name, Paco, embroidered on one side of his chest. His cologne, the stench of high-test gasoline.
Miss Kathie’s violet eyes twitch side to side across my face, up and down, the way they’d vacuum up last-minute rewrites in dialogue.
The sole reason for Katherine Kenton’s admitting herself to any hospital was because she so enjoyed the escape. Between making pictures, she craved the drama of overcoming locked doors, barred windows, sedatives and straitjackets. Stepping indoors from the cold alley, her breath steaming, my Miss Kathie wears cardboard slippers. Not Madeleine Vionnet. She wears a tissue-paper gown under her silver fox coat. Not Vera Maxwell. Miss Kathie’s cheeks scrubbed pink from the sun. The wind has tossed her auburn hair into heavy waves. Her blue fingers grip the handles of a shopping bag she lifts to set atop the kitchen table.
In the screenplay’s third act, Hellman pilots the controls of the Enola Gay as it skims the tops of Japanese pine trees and giant pandas and Mount Fuji, en route to Hiroshima. In a fantasy sequence, we cut to Hellman wielding a machete to castrate a screaming Jack Warner. She skins alive a bellowing, bleeding Louis B. Mayer. Her grip tightens around the lever which opens the bomb bay doors. Her deadly cargo shimmers pristine as a bride, covered with seed pearls and fluttering white lace.
In her own kitchen, my Miss Kathie sinks both hands into the shopping bag and lifts out a hairy chunk of her fur coat. The ragged pile of hair seems to tremble as she places it atop the Hellman screenplay. Two black button eyes blink open. On the table, the damp, hairy wad shrinks, then explodes in a hah-choo sneeze. Between the two button eyes, the fur parts to reveal a double row of needle teeth. A panting sliver of pink tongue. A puppy.
Around the new diamond ring, her movie star hands appear nicked and scabbed with dried red, smudged with old blood. Spreading her fingers to show me the backs of both hands, Miss Kathie says, “This hospital had barbed wire.”
Her barbed wire scars as gruesome as any wounds Lillian shows off from the Abraham Lincoln brigade. Not as bad as Ava Gardner’s scars from bullfighting with Ernest Hemingway. Or Gore Vidal’s scars from Truman Capote.
“I picked up a stray,” says Miss Kathie.
I ask, Which one? The dog or the man?
“It’s a Pekingese,” says Miss Kathie. “I’ve christened him Loverboy.”
The most recent of the “was-bands,” Paco arrives after the senator who arrived after the faggot chorus boy who arrived after the steel-smelting tycoon who arrived after the failed actor who arrived after the sleazy freelance photographer who arrived after the high school sweetheart. These, all of the stray dogs whose photographs line the mantel in her lavish upstairs boudoir.
A rogues’ gallery of what Walter Winchell would call “happily-never-afters.”
Each romance, the type of self-destructive gesture Hedda Hopper would call “marry-kiri.” Instead of plunging a sword into one’s stomach, you repeatedly throw yourself on the most inappropriate erect penis.
The men Miss Katherine marries, they’re less husbands than they are costars. Souvenirs. Each one merely a witness to attest to her latest daring adventure, so much like Raymond Massey or Fredric March, any leading man she might fight beside in the Hundred Years War. Playing Amelia Earhart stowed away with champagne and beluga caviar in the romantic cockpit of Charles Lindbergh during his long flight over the Atlantic. Cleopatra kidnapped during the Crusades and wed to King Henry VIII.
Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived.
Miss Kathie places the puppy on the Hellman screenplay, smack-dab on the scene where Lilly Hellman and John Wayne raise the American flag over Iwo Jima. Dipping one scabbed hand into the pocket of her silver fox coat, Miss Kathie extracts a tablet of bound papers, each page printed with the letterhead White Mountain Hospital and Residential Treatment Facility.
A purloined pad of prescription blanks.
Miss Kathie wets the point of an Estée Lauder eyebrow pencil, touching it against the pink tip of her tongue. Writing a few words under the letterhead, she stops, looks up and says, “How many Ss in Darvocet?”
The young man holding her baggage says, “How soon do we get to Hollywood?”
Los Angeles, the city Louella Parsons would call the approximately three hundred square miles and twelve million people centered around Irene Mayer Selznick.
In that same beat, we cut to a close-up of Loverboy, as the tiny Pekingese drops its own hot, stinking A-bomb all over General Douglas MacArthur.
ACT I, SCENE FOUR
The career of a movie star consists of helping everyone else forget their troubles. Using charm and beauty and good cheer to make life look easy. “The problem is,” Gloria Swanson once said, “if you never weep in public … well, the public assumes you never weep.”
Act one, scene four opens with Katherine Kenton cradling an urn in her arms. The setting: the dimly lit interior of the Kenton crypt, deep underground, below the stony pile of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, dressed with cobwebs. We see the ornate bronze door unlocked and swung open to welcome mourners. A stone shelf at the rear of the crypt, in deep shadow, holds various urns crafted from a variety of polished metals, bronze, copper, nickel, one engraved, Casanova, another engraved, Darling, another, Romeo.
My Miss Kathie hugs the urn she’s holding, lifting it to meet her lips. She plants a puckered lipstick kiss on the engraved name Loverboy, then places this new urn on the dusty shelf among the others.
Kay Francis hasn’t arrived. Humphrey Bogart didn’t send his regards. Neither did Deanna Durbin or Mildred Coles. Also missing are George Bancroft and Bonita Granville and Frank Morgan. None of them sent flowers.
The engraved names Sweetie Pie and Honey Bun and Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq., what Hedda Hopper would call “dust buddies.” Her beagle, her Chihuahua, her fourth husband—the majority stockholder and chairman of the board for International Steel Manufacturing. Scattered amongst the other urns, engraved: Pookie, and Fantasy Man, and Lothario, the ashen remains of her toy poodle and miniature pinscher, there also sits an orange plastic prescription bottle of Valium, tethered to the stone shelf by a net of spiderwebs. Mold and dust mottle the label on a bottle of Napoleon brandy. A pharmacy prescription bottle of Luminal.
What Louella Parsons would call “moping mechanisms.”
My Miss Kathie leans forward to blow the dust from a pill bottle. She lifts the bottle and wrestles the tricky child-guard cap, soiling her black gloves, pressing the cap as she twists, the pills inside rattling. Echoing loud as machine-gun fire in the cold stone room. My Miss Kathie shakes a few pills into one
gloved palm. With the opposite hand, she lifts her black veil. She tosses the pills into her mouth and reaches for the crusted bottle of brandy.
Among the urns, a silver picture frame lies facedown on the shelf. Next to it, a tarnished tube of Helena Rubinstein lipstick. A slow panning shot reveals an atomizer of Mitsouko, the crystal bottle clouded and smudged with fingerprints. A dusty box spouts yellowed Kleenex tissues.
In the dim light, we see a bottle of vintage 1851 Château Lafite. A magnum of Huet calvados, circa 1865, and Croizet cognac bottled in 1906. Campbell Bowden & Taylor port, vintage 1825.
Stacked against the stone walls are cases of Dom Pérignon and Moët & Chandon and Bollinger champagne in bottles of every size … Jeroboam bottles, named for the biblical king, son of Nebat and Zeruah, which hold as much as four typical wine bottles. Here are Nebuchadnezzar bottles, twenty times the size of a typical bottle, named for a king of Babylon. Among those tower Melchior bottles, which hold the equivalent of twenty-four bottles of champagne, named for one of the Three Wise Men who greeted the birth of Jesus Christ. As many bottles stand empty as still corked. Empty wineglasses litter the cold shadows, long ago abandoned, smudged by the lips of Conrad Nagel, Alan Hale, Cheeta the chimp and Bill Demarest.
Miss Kathie’s mourning veil falls back, covering her face, and she drinks through the black netting, holding each bottle to her lips and swigging, leaving a new layer of lipstick caked around each new bottle’s glistening neck. Each bottle’s mouth as red as her own.
Sydney Greenstreet, another no-show at today’s funeral. Greta Garbo did not send her sympathies.
What Walter Winchell calls “stiff standing up.”
Here we are, just Miss Katherine and myself, yet again.
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